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You’ve Got Trust Issues

Google implore their staff to act like founders, and then they give them the tools and permissions to do so. Netflix hire ‘fully formed adults’ and then trust them to act as such. Facebook define trust as Trust = competence + goal alignment.

How stringent are your hiring policies? How many rounds of interviews, psychometric testing and screening do you put candidates through, just to be completely certain that they have all the right skills, characteristics and more.

Why bother? Why go through the rigmarole of finding seriously great employees if you’re going to make them work within parameters that are so narrow, they force a person’s massive potential into a tiny box.

Your employees have a view of your business that is inherently different to your own. You look at your business from the bottle-neck down and them from the lower-mid section of the bottle up. They have got phenomenal insights into your business that you are foolish to shy away from.

After all you went through to hire brilliant people, why on earth would you not trust them to help make your company great(er), they agreed to work here didn’t they – it is in everybody’s best interest for this place to do well.

It is no coincidence that these ‘high trust’ organisations are also some of the worlds most innovative. Trust makes failure ok, trust breeds trying. Where trust exists I know I have the space to do something a little bit differently and that if it fails I won’t be thrashed for it. If your organisation has trust issues – you’ve got innovation issues. If you have innovation issues you might soon find yourselves having an issue staying relevant.

The Google’s, Facebook’s and Netflix’ of the world don’t have trust issues. Perhaps it time to make a conscious effort to get over yours.

You’ll be surprised what people can do when you simply trust them’ – Laszlo Bock, Google.